Fully Anchored Blog

 Estimated Reading Time: (all 4 posts) 21:47 Recently I had a problem – not the first – with accommodative technology ala Microsoft. In many venues, streaming or otherwise, I have trouble comprehending what people are saying, though with my latest hearing equipment, it’s fairly manageable overall. Thus, I was using an accommodation provided in Windows called “Live Captions.” Live Captions does what it says – it captions any speech coming through the “speaker” side of the computer audio stream. The quality of the captioning is considerably better than Google’s “Live Transcribe” on my phone (for that device’s audio), but it’s still nowhere near perfect, and can easily be compared to a standup comedian (including audience hurled tomatoes) with some of the errors it routinely makes. That said, it was more helpful to me than not, so I made it my de facto standard for streaming venues on the PC. Then one fine day, it abandoned me like most of my past girlfriends did when they disco...

I was born a hot mess, but with fine and functional ears up until I was about 9 years old. At that time, I experienced a strange sound that didn’t seem to be coming from the cat, the dog, the TV, my mom’s radio, or a nuclear attack. It was a somewhat pure and steady tone, maybe a piccolo, but there were none of those around, so it was a mystery. It was camping out in my right ear, but my left seemed unaffected. It was quite annoying, but I found that if I ignored it for a while, it would recede into the background or sometimes even disappear. I didn’t notice at the time, but it was accompanied by some significant hearing loss in that ear – demonstrated by routine ear testing that the grade schools did so if “Johnny” seemed a bit slow in class he wouldn’t automatically be stamped on the forehead as “Mentally Retarded” (sorry, that was the term used at the time). He might just be a tad deaf. My mom, not at all content to let this situation pass without intense scrutiny, took me to ou...

I don’t know if there’s a god, but if there is, and he/she/it sent an email with a link to a survey about your experiences/approval of the design of the human body, I’d give it mixed reviews but in the comments box I’d ask this question:                 Why is most of the equipment for balance intimately tied to the equipment for hearing? They’re crammed in the skull all coiled up together like a snail-shell with two compartments. So, all too often, a problem with one is also a problem for the other. I’m the poster child for that concept. As mentioned, the hearing problem started at 9 years old. Remember when I said my disabilities didn’t come all at once? The balance problem waited in the wings for about 30 years after that. When it woke up and reared its head, I honestly thought I’d been poisoned by the barbequed rib dinner I’d just eaten. I couldn’t stand up, and I couldn’t stop throwing up for about 1...

 I have absolutely no idea how to create a “mental disorder.” That sucks, because if I knew how to create one then I’d probably know how to uncreate it. I do know that for most of my life, at least since early adulthood, and in spite of being an intellectual focused monkey – or maybe because of it – I’ve had what some psychologists (who should know) call a mental illness. For the longest time, I was completely oblivious to that concept (mental illness), as I just assumed my problems in life were the result of my parents being bat shit crazy, and thus causing me much childhood trauma. Now, I wasn’t wrong about that – indeed it happened that way – but as I later learned, that wasn’t the whole story. See, it turns out that a brain is as a brain does – or doesn’t do, as the case may be. My brain’s favorite thing to do, ever since I (it?) can remember is fantasize . I could spend thousands of these blog posts breaking that word apart, but the upshot is I loved to avoid realit...

I suppose most people wouldn’t consider rhinitis (seasonal sneazonal, etc.) to be a disability, and I don’t know in all honesty what the SSA thinks about that, but what I can tell you is that it has a very long history of making my existence miserable starting at about the same time as my hearing issues. Back then, it was way worse than it is (for me) now, because the pharmaceutical interventions were pretty pathetic compared to those of today. Today I’m in much better shape ala my allergies, and while I probably suffer from sneezing, wheezing, and watery eyes somewhat more than the average person, it’s all pretty livable these days. I do rely on a daily OTC antihistamine that helps a lot. The only reason I put it on this list is because I was, and I know of many people who are, given awful childhoods and teen times, and adult and old times by allergies – mine are minor compared to some, but they’ve been bad enough to interfere with my life in many ways. So here we are. Disability?...

Asimov, Heinlein, and even Vonnegut dabbled and fiddled with it, marking imaginary time with dreamy hallucinations pressed to paper to the delight of millions. Including me. Nobody that I read anyway could possibly have predicted the weirdness of merging a budding, but quite unfinished world-changing technology with unbridled capitalism. Where there’s money, the watchwords are faster and more, consequences be dammed! Who made this image, and well, who cares? Who sang the song, and then vanished? How do you make a hand – is it five or six fingers? What the hell are ownership, copyright, patents? Does an artist even need fingers? At the current state of AI (“Artificial Intelligence” – an oxymoron if I ever heard one), the above paragraph captures the most apparent issues, but certainly not all. Just as I mused way back when computers got small and light enough to fit on a spacecraft – and of course, a nuclear missile is a spacecraft – running, god help us (in my imagination) one of...